Day Five

Today and over the past couple days I have taken specific interest in discussing with my AT about what content knowledge is appropriate to this year level and how to source it. Valuable knowledge that I have learnt is in regards to reading planning. This school operates using a fully integrated curriculum so everything is connected to the topic of the term. In order to choose reading material for my class my AT uses the students reading age from past results such as e-asTTLe. Then he uses the online journal search database and searches for any book with the current theme. Once he has found some journals he selects the journals closet to reading age then plans his reading from them. In my AT’s guided read program he uses one journal for a week where the teacher directs reading and question of a couple pages per day. Then the students are given a follow activity which is based on giving students further development in the learning objective. This appears to be productive way of organizing reading but my concern is that during this reading lesson students are only reading a couple of pages max. When the students are reading with the teacher a lot of questing and talking takes place but little reading. My thoughts are that this discussion is important because students are learning skills within reading but wonder if from the discussion better follow up needs to take place. Over the next week I want to create follow-up activities that will require students to read further different texts where they can further develop their guided reading learning.